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An account function has been added. If you want to contribute comments, it is now neceesary to log in with e-mail address and password. Also a rating function has been added: for each problem you can give a rating from 0.0 to 4.0 points. The average rating given by all users will be displayed for each problem, and the new search RATING allows to search by average rating.

August 18th, 2004

In order to make searches by keywords more flexible, the following changes have been made:

• A search by keyword now searches for the start of the keyword, not for the complete keyword name, as previously. For example, to search for the Pronkin theme it is now enough to use the search K='Pronkin' (or K='Pronk'), instead of K='Pronkin theme'.
• It is now possible to search for the keyword additions by using the syntax K='<keyword>:<keyword addition 1>;<keyword addition 2>' (without the brackets < and >). For example, to search for the Pronkin theme with queen and rook, the following search expression may be used: K='Pronkin:d;t' (German notation for pieces must be used).

August 16th, 2004

I am very pleased to announce that Brian Stephenson provided his database of 48997 direct mates for import into the PDB. The following number of problems have been added to the PDB:

• #2: 23407,
• #3: 19717,
• #n: 5873.

May 10th, 2004

Today appr. 5000 new problems have been imported into the PDB. The following people contributed new problems:

• Henri Nouguier: appr. 1000 retros in exchange for appr. 6000 retros from the PDB,
• Hans Gruber: appr. 1000 problems of his own,
• Kniest/Gruber/Müller/Staudte: appr. 2300 selfmates and reflexmates from their book "Selbstmatt-Miniaturen/Reflexmatt-Miniaturen",
• Frank Müller: several hundred selfmates.

Dec 30th 2003

The keywords and pieces including their description can now be displayed in English, French or German. The names of authors and sources can be displayed with cyrillic characters (provided that those names have been added to the PDB).

Oct 1st 2003

I am very pleased to announce that Paul Valois contributed his reflex mate collection to the PDB. More than 2000 reflex mates have been added. Any comments, corrections and additions should be sent directly to Paul Valois (whose address may be obtained from me). Many thanks also to Die Schwalbe which contributed the original problems from the last 10 years and to Horst Bäcker who contributed his collection of problems.

Feb 20th 2003

Today the online PDB has been updated. More than 2000 new helpmates have been added thanks to the work of Hans-Peter Reich. Much information has been updated with the kind help of a lot of problemists.

May 4th 2002

The statistic function has been enhanced. For all search expressions it is now possible to display a statistic by authors, sources, genre and keywords. The result is displayed in a chart.

March 25th, 2002

Today the online PDB has been updated. More than 2000 new helpmates have been added thanks to the work of Hans-Peter Reich. Much information has been updated with the kind help of a lot of problemists.

January 2nd, 2002

It is now possible to search for piece patterns in the diagram position of problems. For example, you can search for all problems with Loyd's organ pipes with the following search criterion: PATTERN='sLa1 sTb1 sTc1 sLd1'. For more information please refer to the examples.

September 30th, 2001

The help mate part of the PDB Server has been updated today. Thanks to many hours of work by Hans-Peter Reich the PDB Server now has more than 66000 help mates.

September 8th, 2001

Because of some server reorganisation the PDB site was offline a few times in the last weeks. I try to keep the offline periods as short as possible. Please understand that there will be some offline periods from time to time.

July 1st, 2001

The following search criteria are new: FIRSTNAME, WPIECES, BPIECES, NPIECES, APIECES, COOKED. For more information see the examples